Jason Weiser

after breaking things off with Longbody, and also retreated, shoeless, into the darkness, living in dirt tunnels and dreaming about what might have been.

These stories do not go together in the originals.

They're five disparate tales, but I do think they fit.

To me, they're about inner lives and vulnerability.

Each story has a character who projects one thing on the outside, but who's completely different on the inside.

And it's their own willingness and ability to acknowledge and reveal that interior that determines their outside.

The student and his sister are a genius, and a person who's practicing this sacrificial love...

but on the outside they look like a mourner and a nun until they let the stranger in.

For Chu and his wife, the centipede, they remained connected on a deep level the whole time, each trusting the other implicitly.

And so the former centipede woman reveals even more depth, and the husband even more trust, and it destroys a centuries-old curse.

Longbody and Miss Thousandfeet are the sad inverse of Chew and the centipede woman, because they don't say anything.

They don't trust the other.

You know that if they opened their mouths and told the other how they felt and shared who they were, they would have found love, but they remained walled off by their own assumptions.

Timbertop was interesting because he's someone who had no internal life.

The story seems to say that even as a human, he's an animal who exists only to hoard and eat.

And so that was exactly what the Dokebi turned him into.

But

with the outside matching the inside, he actually grows and develops empathy.

We mainly focused on him turning the game of the rich and powerful on themselves by going around secretly turning people into oxen and then making a name for himself by curing them, but the story is pretty clear that he reconnects with his family and dies a respected and loving person, surrounded by those who care about him.

I'll wrap things up, but the stories today, to me, speak of the need for genuine connection and the stagnation that can come from refusing it.